TELEVISION

TELEVISION; Charlie Rose Never Runs Out Of Things to Say

By JAMES BARRON

Published: June 13, 1993

This is the Charlie Rose story that has been making the rounds: The tall, droopy-eyed talk show host had just left Sylvia's, the barbecue-belt outpost in Harlem. Shambling down the sidewalk after lunch, he was stopped by a street vendor in sneakers and a backwards baseball cap who had some advice: "Sometimes you need to let the guests talk."

Mr. Rose has heard that before. "I know I interrupt too much," he says. Even Mike Wallace of "60 Minutes," a fan of Mr. Rose's, says there are moments when "I want to shout at the screen, 'Shut up, Charlie!' "

After six months on PBS that began with celestial publicity in magazines like Esquire and W (which anointed him "society's new darling"), Mr. Rose has settled into a less stratospheric orbit. The audience for his program, shown weeknights at 11, has not grown to Jay- or Dave- or Ted-like proportions. But he has established a style that fans find thoughtful, nonconfrontational, even courtly -- and that detractors complain is at once intrusive and obsequious. Chopping at the air with his hands, holding up press clippings about the guest he is interviewing, the 51-year-old Mr. Rose spends his hour on the air on the edge of his seat.

Yet if he sometimes looks as if he is ready to pounce, his questions don't seem Sam Donaldson sharp. "Rose asks probing questions," says Neil Postman, chairman of the department of culture and communications at New York University and the author of "Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology," "but he surrounds the questions with so many prefaces and epilogues that you don't realize they're as good as they are."

PBS says Mr. Rose's audience is beginning to build. That could be another way of saying that the program wasn't an instant hit in the ratings, but network officials point out that "Charlie Rose" gets virtually no promotion, so viewers may not know he's on. Even if they do, they have no way of knowing whom he is interviewing on a given night: Often he chooses his guests -- think-tank experts, show-business figures, media luminaries -- just hours before they are on, to keep the show fresh. (Because he still hasn't named an executive producer, he gets involved in a lot of decisions that other hosts don't worry about.)

In the last week in March, the most recent period for which numbers are available, "Charlie Rose" drew a 0.4 rating nationwide on 157 stations, according to PBS officials, with one ratings point equaling 931,000 households. PBS says the 0.4 rating is roughly what those stations were getting with whatever programs they had on before Mr. Rose's show made its national debut in January. "We'd like to see it doing better," said John Grant, a senior vice president at PBS, "but we're not disappointed." There is no danger of cancellation: Officials at WNET, the New York PBS affiliate that broadcast the show alone before the network picked it up, say they are committed to continuing it in 1994, even though they may have to cover about half of its $4 million annual budget because they have yet to line up a national underwriter to help shoulder the costs.

PBS, meantime, is seeking still more exposure for Mr. Rose. The network has sent the White House a proposal for a town hall broadcast with Mr. Rose as moderator. Jeff Eller, a White House spokesman, said last week that no decision had been made.

Mr. Rose and executives at WNET devised the show to serve as "a bookend" at the end of the nightly PBS schedule, to complement the "MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour" at the beginning. Mr. Rose wanted a live show, "not a produced format, like 'Nightline,' " said Harry Chancey Jr., vice president for program services at WNET. The 11 P.M. time slot offered an alternative to blood-and-guts local news shows and a half-hour head start on "Nightline" on ABC and "Tonight" on NBC.

Mr. Rose himself has received enough publicity to be a guest on his own show. He makes the rounds of Manhattan dinner parties and is mentioned frequently in newspaper gossip columns. To orchestrate coverage, WNET hired an outside public relations agent, Susan Magrino, who had represented Martha Stewart and Dominick Dunne at Crown Publishing. And Mr. Rose gets people talking off camera by turning up in all the right places: at a Ralph Lauren fashion show, at Brooke Astor's dinner parties.

But, unlike many television personalities, he does his own homework, or at least tries to. George P. Shultz, the former Secretary of State, seemed surprised that Mr. Rose had actually read his book, "Turmoil and Triumph." "He has tremendous intellectual vigor," Mr. Shultz said after a one-on-one hour with Mr. Rose.

Most of the time, Mr. Rose's show comes from a curtained-off corner of Studio 2A at WNET on Manhattan's West Side, the same studio where the MacNeil half of "The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour" originates. On Wednesdays, Mr. Rose does the show from Washington, where the set is virtually identical.

To long-memoried viewers, the unadorned look of "Charlie Rose" -- round oak table, black backdrop -- is a throwback to Mr. Wallace's "Nightbeat" interview program in the 1950's, except that in the 1990's, the guests do not smoke.